The Writer Who Wasn't There

Nobody Claimed Oxford Wrote The Canon (until about the 20th century at least).

This is probably the single most important piece of evidence against the Oxfordian view. Oxfordians attack the orthodox view of Shakespeare of Stratford as the author on the grounds that there is very little evidence to link him to the plays, with few contemporary references to Shakespeare of Stratford as a playwright and there is very little evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford attended Grammar School.

However, what Oxfordians have to contend with is the fact that there is not a single piece piece of evidence linking Oxford to the plays. There are precisely zero manuscripts with his name on it, no letters in which Oxford discusses his authorship of the plays or in which others discuss Oxford’s authorship of the plays. Absence of evidence in Oxford’s case appears not to be evidence of absence for Oxfordians so how do they deal with this?

In two mutually contradictory ways

a) By claiming that the use of ‘Shake-speare’ as a pen-name for De Vere was so well known that none of his contemporaries would have bothered to comment

b) By claiming that De Vere was in fact dealing with such seditious material in the plays and that play-writing was such a shameful activity for a noble that he was forced to hide behind a pseudonym and the fact we have no evidence is merely proof of how successful this scheme was.

Either of these approaches shows that the main weakness of Oxfordian scholarship is the classical error of ‘begging the question’ or assuming what is intended to be proved. Obviously, claimed Oxfordians, De Vere wrote Shakespeare, therefore there must be a reason why no-one said he did. They fail to notice that while they state that a lack of evidence undermines Shakespeare of Stratford’s claims to have written the plays; it is a lack of evidence that totally destroys any claims De Vere might have had